In 1525 Albrecht Dürer, by then the most famous artist in northern Europe, published a book about compasses and straightedges. It was the first mathematics book printed in German rather than Latin, and it was written for craftsmen: painters, goldsmiths, stonemasons, and typefounders who worked by rule of thumb and…

Before 1753, the name of a plant was a description. The common tomato was known in one catalogue as Solanum caule inermi herbaceo, foliis pinnatis incisis, racemis simplicibus, which distinguishes it from other nightshades by listing its features in Latin. The names were accurate, they were unmemorable, and they changed…

In March 1800, Alessandro Volta wrote to the president of the Royal Society describing a device made of stacked discs of two different metals separated by cardboard soaked in brine. Connected at both ends, it produced a steady electric current for as long as the chemicals lasted. Nothing like it…

The trial of Galileo Galilei in 1633 is the standard example of religion suppressing science, and the standard version is not very accurate. The proceedings turned on a specific legal question about a document from 1616, a book that broke the terms under which it had been licensed, and a…

Some of the flasks are still on a shelf at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. They contain nutrient broth prepared in the early 1860s, exposed to the open air ever since through a long curved glass neck, and after more than a century and a half nothing has grown in…

Around 129 BC, an astronomer working on the island of Rhodes finished a list of the positions and brightnesses of roughly 850 stars. It was the first systematic star catalogue in the Greek tradition, and it made possible a discovery that requires comparing the sky across centuries. Almost nothing Hipparchus…

In 1644 Evangelista Torricelli filled a glass tube with mercury, turned it upside down in a basin, and watched the metal fall until it stood about seventy six centimetres above the surface in the dish. Above it, in the sealed end of the tube, was a space containing nothing at…

The specimens that convinced European naturalists that entire kinds of animal had once existed and then vanished were dug out of a crumbling cliff in Dorset by a woman who could not join the society that debated them, could not publish her own findings, and sold what she found because…

The French translation of Newton’s Principia that scientists use today was completed in 1749 by a marquise working against the clock, convinced she would not survive the birth of her fourth child. She was right. Émilie du Châtelet finished the manuscript, deposited it with the Royal Librarian, and died six…

A few weeks before the total solar eclipse of 3 May 1715, Londoners could buy a printed map of southern England with a broad diagonal band drawn across it. The band showed where the Moon’s shadow would fall. Alongside it were the predicted times of the eclipse and an explanation…